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IB — 47372-2 opo 



I 

§cw-§ttc|tau<t § opt f uMiatum f jwittjj. 






The following Letter, written by an eminent lawyer of Con- 
necticut, previous to the late election in that State, is now 
reprinted for wider circulation, from the belief that its 
argument may be of service in affecting public opinion in 
other States. 



To my friends of the legal profession throughout the State, 
who adhere to the Democratic Party: 

The intense interest which I feel in the result of our approach- 
ing election, surpassing that, I believe, which I have ever felt 
in any former election, makes me disquieted lest I may fail to 
do something which I shall hereafter ieel that I might have 
done for my country in its peril. My health will not permit 
me to speak in public to any great extent, and if it did I could 
get few to hear me Avho are not already agreed with me in 
political sentiment ; and what I might ordinarily Avrite would 
probably reach but the same class. It has seemed to me that 
if I were to address you, you would, for friendship's sake, if for 
nothing else, read what I write — and perhaps some other of 
your political associates beyond the limits of our profession, — 
and I know you will accept what I say as honestly and seriously 
said. I have a very pleasant personal acquaintance with almost 
all the leading lawyers of the State, and I have known no 
difference in their friendly expressions between those of your 
party and those of my own. Many of you have invited me to 
the hospitality of your houses ; not a few of you have honored 
me by partaking of mine. There is not one of you, I know, 
that will not listen kindly to what I have to say. 

It matters not how this war began. You are probably of 
opinion that the opposition of northern anti-slavery men to the 
extension of Slavery, and to the execution of the fugitive-slave 
law, — an opposition regarded by you as unreasonable in extent 
and offensive in manner, — has goaded the South into rebellion. 
My most solemn conviction Js, that the fact is not so. The 
leading men among the rebels have repeatedly declared that it 
was not so. My own settled belief is, that the course of com- 
promises which the democratic party has favored for many 
years, is a more responsible author of our evils. Just as a com- 
promise now would only be a preparation for a more dreadful 
war a few years hence, so every compromise has merely patcl 






H r 



together what was in its nature irreconcilable, and has post- 
poned the outbreak for a little later day. Ten years ago I 
happened to be present at a joolitical meeting in a neighboring 
city, and was called out for a speech. I had not spoken in a 
political meeting for several years, but told the audience that I 
would say a word to them. That word was this: — "The 
policy of slavery-restriction and no-compromise is the policy 
of peace ; the policy of compromise is the policy of war. 
Every inch of ground yielded in a compromise becomes only 
new ground for the slave-power to stand on and demand new 
concessions; and, although compromise postpones an outbreak, 
yet the time will certainly come when concessions will be de- 
manded which even the democratic party will not be willing to 
yield, and then will come Avar. The South, by that time, will 
be ready. They are not now. They will have become em- 
boldened by constant successes, and too arrogant to yield then. 
They have not reached that point now. Our policy of firm 
resistance to every demand for new concessions, not required 
by the constitution, is the policy of peace. The democratic 
policy of concessions is .the policy of war." Thus I thought 
ten years ago; thus I think now. Thus I feel sure history 
will unequivocally declare. 

As I believed then that the policy of compromise was that 
of war, so I believe that the present policy of comjn-omise and 
peace is the policy of ultimate war, far more dreadful in its 
waste of life, far more ruinous in its waste of treasure, than the 
sad war in which we are now engaged. I have not a doubt 
that true j)eace, true economy, true mercy, as well as true 
patriotism, demand of us the most energetic prosecution of the 
present war. If the present generation is to be impoverished 
and thrice decimated by it, it will be a grand investment for 
the good of our children and the world. If we leave the work 
undone, we throw away all the treasures of money and life 
already spent, and leave to our children, whom we ought to 
love more than ourselves, and to enrich whom we are willing 
to toil, a legacy, not merely of shame, but of the most impover- 
ishing and bloody wars. 

The causes of great events are almost always numerous, and 
many of the most potent lie out of the track of common 
observation. Some of the most potent causes of this war are 
probably, after all, latent or unrecognized. The progress of the 
world, the higher moral sentiments of the age as to human 
rights, advancing Christianity, the more distinct antagonism 
between the aristocracy of slavery and the democracy of free 



society, the pressure of the moral sentiment of the Christian 
world upon the whole slaveholding system, have had a great 
deal to do with the production of the war. Christ, the Man of 
Peace, came, 'as he himself declared, not to bring peace into the 
world, but a sword ; and wherever his gospel has gone (and it 
is to go everywhere ; set it at defiance who will, it is to conquer 
the earth), it has produced conflicts, often most bloody, between 
the forces of evil and of good. The world has made its most 
jjositive advances in liberty only as it has stept from battle-field 
to battle-field. The bloody tracks which our revolutionary 
soldiers left on the frozen ground as they marched, are only 
symbolical of the blood-stains which have marked the footsteps 
of liberty ever since the world began. War is a dreadful 
thing. No one can have a stronger impression of its horrors 
than I think I have. Yet the grandeur of heroism the world 
has always acknowledged ; and when that heroism is in a great 
cause, — when the soldier is wrought up to a forgetfulness of 
his own peril in the thought of the peril of liberty, and becomes 
a willing martyr for a great principle, we have one of the 
sublimest forms of true human greatness; and that which 
seems, at first sight, to be only a scourge to the world, becomes 
one of its grandest educators, and a means in God's hands of 
raising up the human race from the low level of mere material 
prosperity to the high plane of ennobling thoughts and great 
principles. 

But whatever was the leading cause, or whatever the co-op- 
erating causes, the war is upon us, and the practical question 
is, what shall we do? What has been done, — what of folly, 
what of cowardice, what of wickedness, — is of little conse- 
quence. The question is, what shall we now do for our country ? 

It seems plain to me that we have but one thing to do, and 
that is to fight. The democratic resolutions say that it is " a 
monstrous fallacy that the Union can be restored by the armed 
hand." Here then, we are distinctly at issue. It is, of course, 
immediate peace that your party demand. But the Southern 
leaders say that they will not accept any terms of peace that 
do not recognize their independence ; and there is not a sane 
man in the States, north or south, who believes that, upon an 
abandonment of hostilities, the Southern States would come 
back to the Union. It is then a monstrous fallacy that the 
Union can be restored by j>eace. On the other hand, is it so 
clearly a fallacy that it cannot be restored by war? You, many 
of you certainly, thought it could but a few months ago, and 
the indications of such a result are far more favorable now than 



then. The rebels are at the point of famine, and will be 
reduced by mere force of hunger, if not by arms. What they 
now mainly rely on, as their own papers tell us, is the divisions 
in the north, — just the kind of demonstration which the 
democratic party in this State made in its late convention, and 
which will become substantial and potent in the success, if it 
occurs, of the party fit the polls. General Dix, who, till he 
became an earnest friend of the war, had your confidence, has 
recently said that he feels sure of the success of our arms. So 
do many others, who were, a short time ago, great lights of 
your party, but who are now earnestly in favor of the war. 
So say and feel our soldiers, who were never more resolute and 
hopeful than to-day. They, instead of weakly leaning upon us, 
to help them bear up under the hardships and j^erils of their 
unaccustomed life, are pouring out upon us the surplus of their 
enthusiasm and energy, to help us at home. A sad and shame- 
ful return will it be on our part, if by encouraging the rebels, 
as the success of the democratic party would certainly do, we 
prolong the war through another weary year, and compel our 
brave sons and brothers to lay down another hundred thousand 
lives that might have been saved. 

But the resolution means, perhaps, that the sticcess of our 
arms would not restore the Union; that a conquest of the 
South would only leave a subjugated territory, not recovered 
States, in our hands. But why do you think this? Because 
they express so much hatred of us ? But would not that stand 
equally in the way of a voluntary re-union? You have no 
good ground for your opinion. The Southerners are not, as 
Were the Poles, a separate nationality. They are not, like 
the Poles, all of one mind on this subject. There are tens 
of thousands of Union men among them. There are also 
hundreds of thousands of poor men, ignorant and imposed 
upon, who are weary of the war, and would accept either- result 
with no Great shock to their sensibilities. Then there are the 
thousands of northern men who will find their way into those 
States ; and most of all, there is the destruction of that system 
of slave labor which has been the one great cause of the 
outbreak, the maintenance of which was the object of the 
revolt, and which would have stood, if unimpaired, most 
seriously in the way of a re-union. When the rebellion fails 
it will become unpopular. Reactions are sure to follow such 
wild extravagances, and the leaders in the rebellion will lose 
all influence, while the now suppressed or banished Union men 
will lead the public sentiment and determine the public meas- 



ures. I feel very sure of this. No one can know with any 
certainty that it will not he so ; while it seems very certain 
that peace would fail utterly to secure the voluntary (and it 
could then only be voluntary) return of the revolted States. 
When we have suppressed the rebellion I should hope, by all 
means, that a magnanimous and conciliating policy would be 
adopted towards the recovered States. When they return to 
us I would be generous, — while they hold out 'I would be 
inexorable. 

If then peace will not bring re-union, and war is to be aban- 
doned, what have we but a division of the country, — a 
partition, voluntarily accepted, worse than that to which Poland 
was compelled to submit. For what would follow a disruption 
of the Union, and the establishment of an independent and 
foreign government in the Southern States? What could 
follow, but a permanent hostility, — the hate on our part that 
has grown out of the Avar (there was not a particle of it before), 
intensified by our failure, and by the great national humiliation, 
kept alive by constant acts of irritation, by the interference of 
rival interests, and by the necessity of defending an almost 
unlimited border line ; and, on tbeir part, by the constant escape 
of their slaves to our free territory, with no fugitive-slave law 
for their reclamation, and no disposition on our part to return 
them; the union sentiment, which, in case the war had been 
successful, would have gained ascendency and have helped to 
bring back the old sentiments of common nationality and 
friendship, completely trodden out, and the leaders of the 
rebellion in permanent power and influence, and using that 
power and influence to intensify and render permanent the 
sentiments of hatred which now prevail. And what would be 
left of our country? The remaining States would no longer 
be the United States of America. That proud name would be 
gone forever. The right of secession would be established as 
a principle, and the remaining union would be only the weakest 
kind of a confederacy, ready to fall into fragments at the first 
tempest that should shake it — or rather already in fragments, 
held temporarily together by an imaginary bond, and the tran- 
sient cohesion of some community of interests. 

Thus inevitably the political ruin of the country, the destruc- 
tion of a great part of its material prosperity, and the extin- 
guishment of all its glory, will follow an abandonment of the 
war. 

Can you look on this result with calmness ? Can you go to 
the polls and vote for the supremacy of a party in the State that 



6 

declares itself in favor of a course that must inevitably produce 
this result ? 

Do you hope for a reconstruction of the Union after its con- 
fessed and formal dissolution? Are you bringing yourself to 
believe that after years of separation and sore experience of its 
evils, the two nations will, by a common impulse, come together 
again and try once more the union which they have discarded ? 
Have you the least ground, the least substantial ground, for 
such a confidence ? 1 1 can not have any. And if a new union 
should be formed it would not be the old union of our proud 
history, the old union of our cherished flag ; it would be a new 
confederation, with a new name to win, and a new credit to 
acquire among the nations ; and it would be a new confedera- 
tion with the right of secession irremovably engrafted upon it. 
The old constitution of our fathers would be gone, and the new, 
by no language that the art of man could employ, could be 
made such an indissoluble covenant as the old. Born in weak- 
ness, it would never have respect abroad nor the force of su- 
preme law at home. 

And besides, since one of your watchwords has been "the 
constitution as it is," how can you consent to such a funda- 
mental change of the constitution, or rather perhaps to a total 
abandonment of it? And again, since your great articles of 
impeachment against the administration are based upon its 
supposed departures from the constitution in the conduct of the 
war, an exigency for which the constitution has not, in terms, 
made adequate provision, how can you make it avowedly a part 
of your plan, to do the most unconstitutional act conceivable, 
in agreeing to a disruption of the Union ? 

I have felt, until recently, my greatest interest in this elec- 
tion, mainly because of its effect on the national policy, and the 
danger that would result to the country at large from the suc- 
cess of the democratic party. I am not without anxiety on that 
point now : but the indications are every where so decided that 
the war will not be abandoned, let what will be the exigency, 
that I have fallen back upon a ground of anxiety, which was, at 
first, far less prominent in my mind. The thought of the coun- 
try had filled my mind to the exclusion almost of the thought 
of my State. That State I love only less than I love the whole 
country. And now the shame that may come upon her is 
constantly in my thoughts, and I long to protect her from it as 
I would protect the good name of my mother. We have had 
a grand history, — may God save us from sullying it. This 
disloyal movement is a madness that has seized the people, 



which will have but its short day, but will, nevertheless, if suc- 
cessful in gaining supremacy, enter into the history of our 
State as a disgraceful defeat in battle would have done. It 
will be more than a defeat in battle. It will be treason as veil 
as cowardice. It will be short-lived. I have no fear of the 
contrary. When our soldiers return to vote again, they will 
stamp it out of sight in the mire. But without them it would 
pass away very soon, and a few years hence the very persons 
who are involved in it will look back with wonder on what 
they have done. Many a mam who will vote for treason and 
cowardice at this election, will hereafter deny that he voted as 
he did; and those unfortunate men (some of them friends 
whom I would have gone far to serve, and whom I would now 
save from such a fate if I could) who have permitted them- 
selves to stand before the people as candidates upon the dis- 
loyal platform of the party, will Buffer a political damnation 
more complete than that to which Benedict Arnold was con- 
signed. This is certainly so. This war, in history, will be the 
proudest and most glorious war that this nation has ever 
known, — surpassing, in all that inspires admiration, the great 
war of our revolution ; and, long before the day when it shall 
have gone into the repose of history, it will have become the 
most popular war in which we have ever been engaged. Then, 
and very soon, will come shame to these abetters and leaders 
in disloyalty ; then will come an indignant and irrevocable con- 
demnation of them on the part of the people. This is just as 
sure to follow as the cause of right is sure to come to final 
success, and the decrees of God to stand. 

The world always passes through its great times without 
being fully aware of them; indeed, on the part of the majority 
of those who live in the midst of such times, with scarcely a 
suspicion of them. "VVe are proud, and shall always be, of our 
revolutionary period ; but the present time is the heroic time 
of our history. Indeed, no conflict since the world began has 
been so grand as this, and history will mark this as the heroic 
age of the world. It may seem to some a petty contest for 
supremacy, between two jealous and angry sections. It is a 
part of that sublime conflict which has been going on through 
all the ages, between liberty and despotism, between the right 
and the wrong, between the powers of good and the powers of 
evil. This conflict is to go on till the right is everywhere es- 
tablished, and the wrong everywhere overthrown. Have you 
no faith in this ultimate triumph of good ? I have the most 
abiding faith. A revelation from Heaven could not mak<. m 



8 

surer. Indeed, we have that now. It matters little, perhaps, 
to the great cause itself, whether you and I are on its side ; but 
it matters everything to us. I would humble myself in suppli- 
cation at the feet of many a fellow-man, to bring him over to 
the loyal side in this great world-contest; but it would be 
more for his own sake than for the sake of the cause itself. 
That is sure to triumph, whether he works for it or against it, — 
but to him the loss is irreparable. The highest worldly suc- 
cesses cannot begin to compensate for the loss of the moral 
elevation, the growth in all that is great and noble, and the 
sublime satisfaction, that come from a conscious union with 
God in his great movements for the benefit of the world. 
Short-sighted men think the world is always to be controlled 
by evil men; but Christ is ultimately "to put all things under 
his feet," and the world will not only accept him as its ruler, 
but call him by acclamation to his throne. Travellers have 
been profoundly impressed as they have looked, in the old 
world, upon the memorials of great nations that have filled a 
large space in the world's history, and have passed away. I 
have looked upon some of these old ruins, but my imagination 
was never filled and inspired by them, as it is by the gathering 
materials, and the foundations which I see laid, for a new em- 
pire, grander than any that the world has ever seen. I would 
not lose the satisfaction, the elevating inspiration, of being con- 
sciously in harmony, both in earnest desire, and in earnest effort, 
with this great movement, for all that I could win of wealth or 
station by stirring the bad passions or humoring the prejudices 
or conniving at the dishonesties of my fellow-men. May God 
grant that in my short day no man may have been made 
morally worse by my influence; but, if possible, may the world 
have been helped on by me a little towards its final good. To 
do Christian duty is the only mode of acquiring any substantial 
wealth; to neglect it is not only a sin against one's moral na- 
ture, in the vital sustenance which he denies it, but a peril that 
is most fearful to contemplate. 

My friends, every man of us has now a solemn and mod 
responsible duty to perform. For the sake of our country, let 
our vote be such as to express the highest loyalty and patriot- 
ism; for the sake of our State, let it be such as to bear up her 
traditional glory; for the sake of our own immortal interc- 
let it be such that we shall not "be found fighting against God." 

"With most friendly regard and esteem, 

Yours, 
Hartford, March 27, 1863. JOHN HOOKER. 



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